The invention relates to a method for tracking postal items, in which the shipping sequence of each postal item is stored in a data record that can be interrogated and is updated during shipping.
In order to ensure that the shipping of the postal items, such as letters, packages and the like, is carried out uniformly at high quality, it is necessary to determine the times at which a postal item is located where during the shipping sequence. In the case of valuable postal items, the customers (senders or recipients) also wish to have current information frequently as to when the postal item has reached the respective intermediate stations.
According to the prior art, two variants are known. In the first variant, the data records are collected and updated centrally. This requires expensive “high end” computers with a high data throughput. If the quantities of data are very high, then such a system can only be implemented technically in a very complicated manner.
In the second variant, the data records that can be interrogated are dispatched electronically in parallel with the stream of postal items and are stored, changed and supplemented in computers in the respective distribution centers. In this case, finding the information can take a very long time, since a search has to be made through the entire network.